Ayla Golf Club

I stumbled about this while flipping through the European Tour website the other day. I don’t do that very often, mainly because I don’t find the time. Generally I appreciate all golf related news, it’s just too much nowadays. Not counting great golf blogs even! :)

But what caught my eye was not an article or a pro event, it was an advert (the one shown here). Good for them, you might argue, but it turned out this is an ad for quite an interesting golf tournament—from various angles.

The tournament is called “Ayla Jordan Mixed Open Golf Tournament” which basically tells you everything. It’s a golf tournament played in Jordan, featuring men and women fighting for the same trophy at the same time in a mixed event. “This is stemming from Ayla’s beliefs that despite their biological differences, men and women have equal power and equal opportunities for financial independence, education and personal development”, the website reads.

While it’s a bit sad that the equality of men and women still is something to promote actively, it is indeed quite interesting to see a tournament organized in that fashion—and who would have thought that amongst the first ones doing that, these are based in the heartland of religious female inequality: Jordan, with the course being just 30 minutes from the Saudi-Arabian border.

Before you come up with some counter arguments: I know Jordan is by far not the most religious country in that region and I actually know some very educated, western-oriented females from Lebanon or other Arab countries, very well with both feet on the ground. So the picture, of course, is not black and white, but still it is something which could be a model or at least fire spark for every golf club in your country: start with one club tournament a year in which men and women are treated completely the same and see if that’s a model you’d appreciate. Don’t take everything too seriously and just enjoy the new format. I sincerely believe this would create some headlines!